Structured data is passed to 3GL as a handle. You reference the handle in the exec 4GL statements whenever you want to reference the object or array. The handle is passed as a 4-byte integer. To store a handle passed in from 4GL, use a 32-bit integer data type.

After control is returned to 4GL, a later call from 4GL to 3GL cannot use the handle stored earlier in a static variable because the earlier handle is no longer valid. Therefore, the 3GL routine should not store a handle in a static variable.